Saturday, August 22, 2009

Saturday's Random Thoughts


By Alan Caruba

Nine Trillion Dollars. That is what the Obama administration now says will be the national budget deficit in ten years. Our current GDP, give or take a trillion, is fourteen trillion a year so you do the math. In seven months President Obama and his Democrat minions in Congress have plunged the nation into debt not seen since the waging of World War II.

Medicare. A million Baby Boomers a year will sign up to receive their Medicare “entitlements” because the members of the population bulge that followed the end of World War II is now officially old. In 1965 Medicare was signed into law as part of the older Social Security system. The enrollment age was based on the fact that 65 was about when people started dying off back then. Now the average life expectancy is 78. And that’s just the average! Little wonder anyone with any sense doesn’t want a rationed Obamacare that will, indeed, let old people suffer in lieu of caring for them. And these are people who paid into the system.

Obesity. I still cannot understand why government at any level should have anything to say about what you eat, how much you eat, and whether you are fat. A lot of fat people had fat parents and fat grandparents. Much of the condition is genetic. The rest involves lots of very affordable and tasty so-called “junk food.” Your weight is your responsibility.

Obama. I am likely to be saying this for years to come. Barack Obama is stupid. He’s stupid in the way a spineless salesman will make up things in order to make a sale. I don’t mean stupid in that he couldn’t get through college and law school. A lot of people do that and they remain essentially stupid because they cling to some very bad ideas and bad attitudes that warp their lives and, if granted power, wreak havoc on hapless victims. That’s us. He’s stupid because he thinks spending billions and billions of our dollars has no consequences or, at the very least, he won’t have to suffer them.

Mainstream Media. The Society of Professional Journalists was founded in 1909 and on August 27 it will hold a convention celebrating its centennial, but I’m betting relatively few of its 10,000 members will attend. This is because a large and growing portion of them will be out of work and unable to afford to rub shoulders with their brethren. I have been a member for some 25 years, having joined back when I was a reporter. They will have many panel discussions during the convention, but I suspect none of them will address the way journalism has shed its credibility like a cloak of invisibility. The news media, print and electronic, now stands naked for its appalling abdication of truth-telling. The biggest lie remains “global warming” which it continues to tell every time it can. The other is the notion that Barack Obama is even minimally fit to be President.

Offshore Oil Drilling. Toward the end of his eight years in office, former President Bush lifted the ban on drilling for oil and natural gas on the nation’s continental shelf. Some 85% of the area beyond our shores remain, for all intents and purposes, banned now that the Obama people hold power, nor is there any prospect of drilling in ANWR, a God-forsaken Alaskan wilderness perched atop billions of barrels of the stuff. Meanwhile, Cuba has signed deals with Russian and China to drill off its shore which just happens, at one point, to be ninety miles from Florida. This week we learned that the Obama administration has authorized lending $2 billion for offshore drilling. To Brazil! This is obscene.

The Greens. It’s summertime and, in the summertime, it gets hot. On August 25th, the National Wildlife Federation along with the Physicians for Social Responsibility will host a conference call for the media warning about heat. “Perspectives will be provided regarding the latest scientific research on heat waves and global warming,” says their announcement, claiming that heat will have “disproportionate impacts on people of color.” They are going to try to turn heat into a racial issue. The truth is that the Earth is now firmly into a cooling cycle that began in 1998 and it is likely to last another ten to twenty years. Heat waves occur naturally and global warming is a hoax. We may well see summers in the years to come that are unnaturally brief or non-existent because it will get cold and stay cold.

The Jews. What will the Jew-haters do when the world runs out of Jews? The results of a recent study, a survey of U.S. religious identification, have been released and it turns out that the number of American Jews has decreased from 5.5 million in 1990 to between 5.2 to 5.4 million today. Jews are inter-marrying out of the faith or just not showing up in the synagogues as they become increasingly secular. It’s not a big drop, but let’s put it in perspective. There are 12.5 million people living in Los Angeles and some 19 million living in New York. In Israel, there are some 7 million people, but a million of their citizens are Muslims. In terms of population, you could put all of America’s Jews in a small city in Iowa. If the Israelis don’t bomb the hell out of Iran’s nuclear facilities, there will be another Holocaust and then even the Jew-haters will miss them because they will have no one to blame for everything.

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